Learning to love hilsa

THE FOOD CLUB

If procuring Bangladeshi hilsa has just become tougher, thanks to recent laws banning their export to India, O Calcutta shows no sign of the strain.

Currently, all three branches of this restaurant "" Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi "" are in the grip of a hilsa festival. I was dragged there, kicking and screaming, by two friends, from East and West Bengal respectively.

My hazy memories of ilish maach, spoken of quite as reverently as we in the north speak of tandoori kukkad, was when as a teenager I was served a bony piece of fish whose lack of defining flavour was compensated by a plethora of bones, all pointing in different directions. After that, hilsa became worse than a four-letter word: it became a five-letter one.

Several decades have since gone by, so when my friends urged me to give hilsa another shot, I ran out of excuses. I'm glad I did. That lunch in the clubby atmosphere of O Calcutta's Delhi branch was a revelation.

Kinshuk took over ordering that afternoon, so we had no fewer than six hilsa preparations, while it fell to Abhishek to explain the finer points of each. We started with chorchori flavoured with the head of the fish, and proceeded onwards through pan-fried, spiced hilsa to hilsa curry to fried roe of hilsa and, as a special treat for my hosts, the oil in which the fish had been fried, savoured with rice.

It reminded me of the Peking Duck dinner I had in Beijing where pancakes preceded an array of dishes with duck as an ingredient.

Like salmon, the hilsa is a sea fish that swims up the river of its origin to spawn. It is only in the season when it lays eggs that hilsa is eaten as a delicacy. That is, for 10 weeks in the year.

For the rest of the year, it is only just above any other fish in taste. The Padma river in Bangladesh is where the finest specimens come from; rivers elsewhere in the country produce fish, that my friends assure me, are not worth the name hilsa. Whether this is because of patriotism or actual fact, I would not know.

Neither is it enough procuring fish from one river in Bangladesh for 10 weeks of the year: the fish must also be of a certain size. Less than a kilo, and the flesh has not had time to develop the prized flavour, and the bone to flesh ratio is too high. Larger than a kilo and a quarter, and the fish loses most of its flavour.

Performing sex determination tests on the hilsa during this time is quite all right, as the female carries eggs during this period. What I got to taste of the eggs was an eye-opener: hilsa eggs beat the hell out of any roe of any fish, including "" dare I say it "" caviar.

Boneless hilsa dishes that were ordered for my novice palate were pleasant enough, but for my money, I'll have my hilsa with the bones intact, thank you.

marryamhreshii@yahoo.co.in